Nanocrystalline silicon quantum dots thin films prepared by magnetron reaction sputtering

Abstract

Silicon is a kind of excellent semiconductor material and is one of the core material of microelectronics. But it is not a fine luminescent material. The photoluminescence(PL) will be obtained by excitation only when the size of silicon partials reduced to a certain value. Nanocrystalline silicon films have special structure and many excellent optoelectronic properties and are supposed to be applied in optoelectronic devices and large scale integrated circuits. In this paper, Nanocrystalline silicon films was deposited on silicon substrate by RF magnetron sputtering with pure Si target. And the working gas is the mixture of oxygen and argon .The content of O₂ in working gas (O₂/ O₂ + Ar) and the power of sputtering were changed separately .However, the substrate temperature, working gas pressure and other conditions were definite. After annealing in the stove, we got the Nanocrystalline silicon particles in the thin films. Fourier transform infrared(FTIR) transmittance measurement was carried out to characterized Nanocrystalline silicon films. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) measurement was also performed to estimate the atom ratio of the Nanocrystalline silicon films. Raman scattering measurements was also taken in to characterize the Nanocrystalline silicon films. The formation of Nanocrystalline silicon filmswere depended partly on the parameters of experiment. The annealed silicon films were researched that the size of the Nanocrystalline silicon particles proved to be largely impacted by the annealing temperature in the thin film